Sound Still
UCT Irma Stern Museum 29 August - 16 September 2006
| Home | Exhibition Details | Participants | On curating | Opening address | Catalogue |
Katherine Glenday
I am extremely grateful to Lyn Smuts for writing a catalogue for the exhibition which covers the theoretic basis of this exhibition. I spent days trying to harness my thoughts into a communicable form so that I could try to point out the many themes which are held in this constellations of artist's work. Lyn has made sense of that writing and extended it into her own research which she has been engaged in through the university of Stellenbosch's art faculty. She has been exploring the phenomenon of sound waves and the visual depiction of sound for a lot longer than the rest of us. She has read and experimented extensively and has shared what she has found with generosity. Her essay leaves me free to express my perceptions about this exhibition, its process and the participants from a rather more personal perspective.
When I think about the participants I feel great warmth for the wonderful people that they all are, in their exceptional and diverse forms of creativity. We have all so enjoyed working with one another and often bewail our busy lives, as we have had to push much else aside (with determined focus) to make the time to do this work. Despite all of our busy lives, we have loved the times when we have 'played' together and in that business, commonly value stillness and the power of meditative play. Stillness for all of us - is a dream and horizon that we yearn towards and making art and music touches on that stillness and is the haven and the place where we are most at peace and most alive.
As artists we all are grateful for the richness of the gift of creativity and the joy in sharing that with others. We believe that what we do is important for the world and we work long hours to make that as perfect as we are able. Sound Still is entirely self funded and I am grateful to all the participants for giving so generously of their time and resources. It is testimony to the fact that there is bounty in our lives to share.
As I was working on my wheel, worrying about the cost of the invitation or the expense of the equipment we needed, I scrawled out the following reverie:
Money makes the world go pear shaped,
yet the world could make money
go round.
There is enough.
In composing or constellating this group of artists, the word recognition is the best one I can use to describe the common impulse I felt as I have encountered their work. Most of them have been my friends for years, and have taught me much and expanded what I see. I have more recently met Neo Muyanga and John Turest-Swartz and with both of these talented and busy men, I have the same wish that there was more time to enjoy their company and their considerable gifts and the generosity of their spirits.
Claire Beynon and I studied art together in the eighties and although she has lived in New Zealand for the past fourteen years, we have maintained a very close and fruitful friendship. We have long dreamed towards exhibiting together and this is the beginning of what we hope will be many transatlantic interchanges. I saw Lore Heuerman's work about fourteen years ago and have also had a dream to work with her ever since. I have learned much just from looking at her many beautiful catalogues of photography and calligraphic drawings. She is a maestro and we are honored that she agreed to make the journey from Austria to engage with us. She arrives four days before the exhibition to meet the dancers of Remix and to improvise alongside Neo Muyanga and Johan Rautenbach. Part of what she brings, is the experience of an amplified perception of music and sound and human energetics. She will teach us much.
My own engagement with porcelain has been long and passionate. It was an accident that I came to work with clay, but once I found porcelain I never looked back. It has been an enduring love for the last 27 years. I love its translucency and the craft and skill required to work with it. The finished object for me is an embodiment of time and concentration and the attendant thoughts and dreams which are submitted to the ravages and transformations of the firing process. Something new and surprising always emerges. It is analogous to life. I have learned to work with this process, and to respect the dance between the intention and the dream and what survives the fire. I am not patient by nature, but I am learning respect.
I have always thought about the vessel as a poignant metaphor for our humanity and bewailed the burden of the decorative and merely ornamental role which the ceramic object has inhabited in our increasingly materialistic culture. Awareness of home 'décor', designer ceramics and the comodification of artist's work is insidious because although it appears to validate our work, it also subverts what we see and attempt to make visible, into just one of the parts of a 'decorated' interior.
Meaning has little place here, and whereas I believe a home or public space should be the expression of the inhabitants and their values, it has too often become a 'styled' showcase of a 'look' mainly to do with material aspirations. This in turn has spawned a flood of cheaply reproduced objects which puts the artists and originators of the designs out of business. This is a facile beauty which is skin deep and has a nasty unfurling sting. It is the counterfeit flower of a myopic consumer culture. The irony is that the word 'soul' can now be found on cosmetic products, on bath towels and has become a marketing buzz word which makes my soul droop.
Sound Still is our offering of a different kind of soulishness. As a group of creative people working together we have been actively and consciously engaged in a co-creative process. What has made this possible is that we do not see creativity as the preserve of any one group of people or our own creativity as a separate and inviolate activity in our lives. It is impossible to put a sequential framework around the work that has been produced or to credit any one of the artists with more or less influence over the final body of work.
Curating this exhibition has afforded me the most profound joy because I have consciously inhabited a role which I realize I have played unconsciously in the past. It is a process bourn out of recognition and the recognition has worked both ways. As Lyn mentions in her catalogue - the initial impetus to approach the Irma Stern Museum and to set a time and place came from the collaboration with Remix dance company and musician Neo Muyanga. As I saw my vessels embraced as musical instruments in their own right, and danced with reverence and irreverence, I was overwhelmed with the realization that what was happening and enabled by other creative people was what I had been straining towards for so long. Remix literally crashed through the ceiling I had long been bumping up against. Needless to say, it came by a series of 'magical and chance' encounters. It was the same 'goosebump, heart thump' experience when, knowing that I wanted to work with Lyn Smuts, and having long appreciated the fineness and sensitivity of her etchings of landscapes, I walked into her studio to be presented with her first etchings of the Chladni patterns. They literally made me want to cry. It was a moment of profound recognition.
When I look at art, I am interested in personal intent and in the process of well crafted and mindful activity. I value the artist as an individual and as an important social being. This group of artists all have a few things in common:
We are all well established in our respective creative careers, we maintain and honor our individuality whist engaging freely with one another, we respect the natural world as our source and so we respect the physical aspect of life, enquiring into its physical and metaphysical nature. In our different ways, we are all keen searchers for meaning and yearn to make contributions of social worth.
We have all focused on the permeability of matter and specifically, the phenomenon of sound and sound waves. We have engaged our various artistic processes to spring eternal and ultimately unanswerable questions. We have harnessed our various forms of craft and pooled what we know and see in order to explore and make these explorations visible in an embodied form. We have explored and attempted to 'still' the evidence of how sound affects matter and how in fact the airwaves around us eddy with pattern.
Lyn Smuts spearheaded the work by printing the visible patterns which sound waves make. It was very moving to watch her conjuring up a symphony of the most exquisite patterns by means of drawing a violin bow across a metal plate causing sand particles to dance their intricate patterns. This phenomenon was initially explored by German Physicist Ernst Chladni in the eighteen hundreds, and while many people know of the 'Chladni patterns', somehow the relevance and implications of the continuum between sound and form seems only now to be able to be commonly assimilated into our everyday consciousness.
We see more than ever before, that there is a general awareness of developments in contemporary physics which are percolating into popular consciousness. The implications of these directly affect how we understand the world and 'the thought forms' we have used up until now to form our cosmology. Quasi-scientific talk by artists is possibly less useful than the artistic manifestations of their thoughts. Pages of text can not do justice to or encompass the many connecting threads discovered in this collaborative journey towards understanding.
I often joke that while I do not know anything, I have friends that do. It is not entirely untrue. Christina's engagement with contemporary science and with mathematics and theories of cosmology, or Lyn's engagement in art theory or John, Neo or Johan Rautenbach's understanding of the mathematical progressions in music or the mechanics of acoustics are all mysteries only guessed at by me. It is probably accurate to say that half of us are more comfortable with the poetic and imaginal and not grounded in scientific theory at all. It has taken me a personal journey to not be cowed by the sea of 'facts' accessible on the internet at the touch of a button. I have little personal use for the specifics and my work demands hours of silent engagement where my only company is what lives within. I believe that trawling for truth can happen as effectively from within or out of engagement with what is without.
Trying to communicate through discursive text has caused all of us many a headache at the computer - and a conscious wrestling with the implicit demand for written validation and explanation of our processes. While we would all much rather have been making art, it has to be said that writing has forced and clarified our thinking. Nevertheless, I believe that the most potent form of thinking comes in the middle of a creative process. Having to write about that process and describe it in words is extremely challenging because perception and therefore creativity is not a linear process. I don't even believe that there is an end result to our explorations - and an exhibition is merely a point where the work is held still and communicated - before it carries on. Time becomes the authoritative 'still' point and the viewers become the appointment.
As the artists we can not access how or what our offerings will stir. For example some of the forms which the sound waves manifest are reminiscent of aboriginal symbols. For me they become the writing of an amplified cosmology. I find them profound and complex. For someone holding a different understanding of the world, they might be seen as primitive, or worse.
I think that the time has come for us to retrieve many areas of understanding which have been lost to us and which the 'primitives' once knew. We will access this intelligence differently as our understanding of the world has changed. The contemporary perception of matter and the metaphysical does seem to be repairing chasms of erstwhile division. These divisions have existed between energy and matter, between the masculine and feminine, and between the individual and the community or tribe.
What is more understanding has become specialized, outsourced and isolated or fragmented into areas of specialized knowledge. This leaves the individual passive to things perceived as outside of his or her control. Knowledge and understanding should not only be the preserve of scholars, carried in linear discourse (with footnotes) or outsourced and beyond the understanding of 'common' people. As we have lost connectivity, we have lost the fabric of community and the joy and safety of communion and belonging.
We live in a world where the disruptions in electromagnetic fields affect migratory habits of animals (and ultimately will endanger our lives); where resources are plentiful yet ill utilized and distributed, where we are at once overloaded with information and sensory bombardment yet overlook the threatening ecological crisis which we have created. We can no longer see the wood for the trees. There is great isolation and loneliness in an overpopulated world and yet I believe that reestablishing the threads of connection is our hope.
As complex as our differing responses to life are, as artists we have attempted to engage in a creative process with mindfulness and to work towards a state of inner stillness. We commonly understand the value of stillness and find ourselves and others through that stillness. What flows around us as sound becoming form, is the artwork. What we are as individual artists is the artwork. What flows between maker and viewer is the art work and perhaps most significant for us has been what has flowed between us as artists. It has illuminated what I see as an ongoing artistry of evolution, refinement and development of perception and consciousness. As artists and poets and musicians and dancers we are all at work to paint new pictures of belonging and of resonance.
William Blake writing in the late 1700's called the disembodied spirituality where evil and matter were seen as one and the same 'mind forged manacles' (Keynes 1976: 216):
In the The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 1790 he says:
…But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul: for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight. (Keynes 1976: 149)
'Urizen' whose name was compounded out of 'horizon' and 'your reason' was one of Blake's mythical cast of characters whose boundaried perceptions caused loss and ignorance of divine vision. (Paley 1978: 184)
In our era it is the respectable field of physics which heralds a comparable understanding of energy and matter - we are perhaps now approaching a world which Blake might have inhabited comfortably.
As poets and artists we leapfrog the facts, - with one eye on our interior lights and intuitions, and one on the social fabric from which we spring. We connect the dots. Walt Whitman in 1881 in" Song of Myself" says:
"…For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you (line 3)
Even before William Blake or Walt Whitman wrote their poetry (often to accusatory cries of blasphemy and madness), 13th century Persian poet, Jelaluddin Balkhi (or Rumi) was writing ecstatic poetry. It is no surprise that his writings have recently been rediscovered and are widely read as he sings of the ecstatic divine in all of life. He makes no distinction between what was once thought to be physical and therefore profane and the metaphysical which was thought to be sacred.
The wave-particle conundrum has posited some mind-bending questions about the physical nature of things. For example, is a thing only constellated as that thing once it is seen by a viewer? The implications of this raises questions about the importance of artist's role in perceiving and interpreting the world. The artist is potentially a critical member of the tribe and a midwife to new forms of perception. The divide between artist and priest is a relatively modern construct, and has excused the artist the role of Shaman, reducing it to iconoclast, activist, provider of status for the rich and alas, interior decorator. All of the latter operate out of a social norm which generally lauds individualism and rewards intellectually elitist practice.
There does seem to be a growing consciousness of our interdependence and what it is possible to achieve with finely tuned perception and respect for the group dynamic or field. The word 'field' has its own resonance which calls up in my mind the psychodynamics which Arnold Mindell explores with his Process Orientated Psychology. His works "Sitting in the Fire" and "Quantum Mind" made me aware of energetic fields inhabiting constellations of people. In a similar manner, psychologist, Bert Hellinger's work on family constellations also illustrates in practice that it is possible to reconstellate a 'family field' and thereby gain access to information on patterns in family dynamics. These are tangible and specific. (Mindell 2000) (Hellinger 2005).
My limited experience of both of these modalities has greatly influenced the way I 'read' interactions between people. Both psychologists hold that only in inhabiting one's individual role accurately, does the group function healthily. If there is a 'gap' in the field, things go awry. At one point in our interactions Christina Bryer laughingly said, "I know that I am the alchemist." It has been true. She has an enormous practical knowledge of materials and a practical intelligence which is inspiring and has helped solve many a taxing problem. I have come to realize that I am like the connective tissue and that this interactive process has helped all of us to reach a clearer definition - and the process is by no means over. It is hard to delineate what 'came towards me' and what I actively constellated in setting this exhibition in motion. As I write, I am aware of many streams of personal preoccupation which I have been engaged with for a long time which attend this show. These are things which all the participants and other artists and friends have shared with me and taught me. At the same time I can not know what others will perceive from what they see or the effect that it will have on them. It is like consigning a work to the kiln. The rest is out of my hands and that is just beginning.
So our work is about stillness, about arrested sound and form, it is about movement and about waves or currents that pass through matter and each other. It is about pattern in matter and patterns in groups. We hope to describe this dynamic visually in the group work on the exhibition. By working together in a group process which was facilitated by Mirjam Macleod, the individual quality of each one of our marks can be recognized and at the same time it is clear that as a group we have formed something new.
We all understood from the beginning that to work 'with' expands the process and brings about change. This has involved flexibility, trust and generosity and challenges society's ideas of sole ownership and boundaried lifestyles and attitudes. These gave way to our sense of the greater whole. This as a physical process called upon a different way of perceiving our interactions and have come from a deep respect for creative play. It bypasses conventional 'thought forms' and brings more subtle energy patterns back into focus. Lyn and I made a series of 'sound conversations' which look like dancing figures. To me they look like the great green feminine spirit of the earth - rising and reminding us of our interrelationships to each other and dancing us back to health and reverence for the earth as our source and each other as part of ourselves.
Thank you to the physicists who have given credibility to what the 'primitives' were tattooing on their bodies - as an act of reverence and honoring.
Thank you to the scientists like Rupert Sheldrake who burst the confines of scientific protocol, jumped some spaces and gave us explanations which some of the artists and poets have also known. Condolences to all those that went down in history as 'mad'. They are often the true visionaries. (The labels that we give things have great power to determine what they are.)
The creative endeavors of 'Sound Still' embody our heartfelt longings and dreams for understanding and reverence for life. Language alone can not do justice to what we are beginning to perceive about energy and matter and what these implications are for us as we live what increasingly feel to be precarious lives on an embattled and plundered earth.
Katherine Glenday
June 2006
A Way of Being Free - Ben Okri, pg 22
The artist should never lose the spirit of play. It is curious how sometimes the biggest tasks are best approached tangentially, with a smile in the soul. Much has been written about the seriousness with which important work has to be undertaken. I believe that seriousness and rigor are invaluable, and hard work is indispensable - but I want to speak a little for the mysterious and humble might of a playful creative spirit. Playfulness lightness all terrifying endeavors. It humanizes them, and rings them within the realm of childhood. The playfulness becomes absorbing, engrossing, all-consuming, serious even. The spirit warms. Memory burns brightly. The fires of intelligence blaze away and self consciousness evaporates. Then - wonderfully - the soul finds the sea: and the usually divided selves function, luminously, as one
